Cryptography plays a central role in securing communication and information technology services around the world. Academic research in cryptography runs a broad spectrum, from pure mathematics to applied computer science and software and electrical engineering. Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) is Canada's research conference on cryptography, held annually since 1994. SAC consists of contributed talks on refereed scientific papers selected by an international program committee. This year, as for the past few years, SAC will be preceded by the SAC Summer School, which will feature invited instructors lecturing on advanced topics in cryptography, oriented primarily towards graduate students, post-doctoral, and industry researchers working in cryptography. SAC is unique among cryptography conferences in that it focuses on several selected areas in cryptography, as its name suggests. There are four topics covered at each SAC conference. Three of the topics are permanent: 1. Design and analysis of symmetric key primitives and cryptosystems, including block and stream ciphers, hash function, MAC algorithms, cryptographic permutations, and authenticated encryption schemes. 2. Efficient implementations of symmetric and public key algorithms. 3. Mathematical and algorithmic aspects of applied cryptology. Each year a special topic is selected. This year's fourth topic is: 4. Real-world cryptography / cryptographic protocols in practice. This year, SAC's call for papers will include a statement stating that SAC also welcomes papers with a focus on post-quantum cryptography. Currently, there is a significant effort in the cryptographic community on developing public key cryptography algorithms that are resistant to attacks by quantum computers; this effort is centred around the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum cryptography project, currently in the first year of a 3- to 5-year public standardization process (https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Post-Quantum-Cryptography). SAC's four topics have particular relevance in today's research environment. Symmetric key cryptosystems are the workhorses of secure communications technology, yet there remain gaps in the ecosystem. While symmetric key cryptography is in general more efficient than public key cryptography, most symmetric key cryptosystems are still too inefficient to use on very small devices, such as embedded devices and sensors for the Internet-of-Things. A major thrust of research in symmetric cryptography at present is lightweight cryptography, which aims to provide fast and efficient symmetric algorithms for constrained environments, and NIST is in the beginning stages of a lightweight cryptography standardization project (https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Lightweight-Cryptography). SAC's first and second topics will provide opportunity for dissemination of new advances in this area. There are several new directions that focus on mathematical aspects of applied cryptology. The post-quantum cryptography research effort has resulted in many new mathematical techniques for constructing cryptosystems. It is now essential that these be matched by research that assesses and develops algorithmic techniques for breaking these cryptosystems, so that we have a clearer understanding of the security of these cryptosystems. Research in this area is also now considering the additional power that quantum computing gives attackers, including: quantum algorithms for breaking mathematical assumptions, new proof techniques for arguing security against quantum adversaries, and security in scenarios where adversaries have the ability to interact with a cryptosystem in quantum superposition (for example, the quantum random oracle model). SAC's third topic, and its special emphasis on post-quantum cryptography, will highlight these issues. Our fourth topic emphasizes the expanding role that academic cryptography plays in the design and analysis of real-world cryptography protocols. The past 5 years have been marked by an unprecedentedly productive collaboration between the industry standards community and the academic community in developing the next version of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) standard used to protect communications on the Internet. We have seen a myriad of techniques used to study the security of TLS 1.3 -- including formal verification, model checking, and reductionist security. The results of these academic analyses were fed back into the standardization process to improve the design of the protocol and avoid flaws, but also have advanced the state of the art in terms of the techniques themselves. SAC's fourth topic will encourage the application of these techniques to other real-world protocols in new scenarios, and the further enhancement of these techniques.

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